PHP is a strange and (let’s get it over with) ugly, little language. It’s not exceptionally fast. It’s not beautiful syntactically. It’s not formulated around a clear opinion. And it’s still what I write a lot of software in. The obvious question is: why? Well, It’s EVERYWHERE… There are a lot of reasons to know […]
“What’s an API?” is one of those questions that is really powerful, important, and interesting, but hadn’t crossed my mind in a while. Programmers talk about APIs all the time, and increasingly it’s a term that non-programmers will have heard at some point. But what exactly one is is a rich and interesting question. Application […]
I found some time over the recent holidays to update our free and simple Required Featured Image plugin. So I’m excited to tell you about an important new feature: it now works for Posts, Pages, and custom post types. (Relevantly, I just wrote a post at WPShout about how and why you’d use custom post […]
We didn’t have time to share this last week, but we are pretty excited that we bought a little WordPress-focused site called WPShout. We did manage to get a post out over there about the transition of that site, but we thought it also made good sense to go into a little detail about what […]
Security is a big and complex area. Everything from the quality of your encryption algorithms, the privileges of your file access policy, and the nature of your cryptographic signature are part of security. But even without understanding what I meant by any of those things, you can still have a big impact on the security. […]
WordPress shortcodes are a simple way to add styling or other customizations inside of the content of a post, page, or custom post type. They make it very easy to do so, are the way that WordPress does galleries by default, are a great way to execute buttons (I’ve added one we use all over […]
One of the simpler and more powerful concepts that runs underneath WordPress themes is that of the template hierarchy. It’s super powerful and can make your life much easier as you build out a theme for your site. And it’s not all that complex, so once you get the idea you’ll find working on themes […]
Last Friday we released our second free plugin on the WordPress plugin repository. It’s pretty simple: it just requires that every Post on a WordPress site has a featured image, so that a publisher can spend less time worrying about compliance to the editorial style or wondering if they’re site will break or look less-than-ideal […]
We nearly forgot to post this: We released our first free plugin last week. It’s really simple: it just makes it so a user can only put a post into a single category. You can install it by downloading it from the WordPress plugin repository or just by searching “Only One Category” on the Plugins > […]
Spurred on by this strongly worded, and spot-on, post I saw from Leland at Theme Labs about why a theme should never include its own shortcodes, I’ve finally written my thoughts about what WordPress themes are doing wrong. The Problem with the WordPress Ecosystem One of the greatest things about using WordPress is that there are […]
One of the first things that typically stumps people trying to make WordPress themes is the concept of “The Loop.” It’s the core concept of WordPress, so wrapping your head around it is definitely worth the upfront time cost. Our goal here is to make the concept clear first, and then to move on and […]
